Jews -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
Here, returning from Redwood's on the last night of November, 1882, he
sat down, and abandoned himself to a whole set of new emotions that had
been let loose in his heart. He did not understand these emotions; he
did not try to understand them. If he had understood them, he might have
taken measures to subdue them in their inception; and then the whole
course of his subsequent life would have been altered, and this story
would never have been told. They were very vague, very strange, very
different from any thing that he had ever experienced before, and very,
very pleasant. As often as he went over the events of the evening,
recalling Christine's appearance, and her manner, and the way she had
looked at him, and the words that she had spoken, he became conscious
of a sudden, delicious glow of warmth in his breast. Then, when he went
forward into the time yet to come, and began to paint her portrait in
imagination, he had to draw a long breath, a deep sigh of pleasure, so
exhilarating and so fascinating was the outlook. By and by he was called
back to the present, by the clock of St. George's church tolling out
midnight. He started, rose, stretched himself, went to bed. But an
hour or two elapsed before he got to sleep. Christine's golden hair and
lustrous eyes lighted up his dreams.
III.
SUNDAY came; and with it a warm sun, a blue sky, a soft, southerly
breeze. It was one of those days, peculiar to our climate, which, though
they may fall in the middle of winter, bear the fragrance of April upon
their breath, and resuscitate for a moment in one's heart all the keen
emotions dead since last spring-time. Elias presented himself at the
Redwood house shortly after nine o'clock. Christine smiled upon him,
and gave him a warm little hand to press. Her father asked, “How about
costume? Want her to make up?” Elias said, “Oh, no; what she has on is
perfect.” That was a simple gown of some dark blue stuff, confined at
the waist by a broad band of cardinal ribbon. Her golden hair was caught
in a loose knot behind her ears. Elias set up his easel in the parlor.
Then he began the process of posing the model. This called for nice
discrimination, and was productive of much mirthful debate. At last it
was finished.
“Now,” said old Redwood, “this is altogether too fine a day for me to
spend cooped up in the house. I'll leave you two young folks to take
care of each other. I'm going to read my newspaper in the park. Sunday
don't come more than once a week, you understand. By-by, Chris. So long,
Mr. Bacharach.”
He went off.
For a while Elias worked in silence. So great was the pleasure that he
got from studying this young girl's beauty, and endeavoring to transfer
the elements of it to his canvas, that he never thought of how heavily
the time might lag for her. But all at once it occurred to him.
“Why,” he reflected, “I'm treating her for all the world as if she were
a paid model. This won't do. I must try to amuse her.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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